Laruaville 4 Christmas Match 3 Puzzle

I'm actually on the fence, but don't want to give it a "no". The Laruaville ghosts want to celebrate Christmas, and their idea of doing it appears to be making things a blast...literally. The 91 levels have plenty of automatic explosions to the point of it being annoying at times because all that blasting can ruin match setups too. While the game has a definite puzzle element to reaching all the coins, winning seems to be as much a matter of luck with getting explosions in the right places at the right times as it is being able to see what steps to take next.

While the town scene is cute and looks festive, the story really put me off because it was about getting things decorated and receiving gifts at the end. I get that being overtly religious is definitely pushing it, but on the other hand, putting up decorations and getting things isn't really what Christmas is about either. And I do not belong to any organized religion. Just sayin'.

You can easily finish the town before the actual end of the game if you play all the mahjong minigames which appear between levels. Despite there being a "parking spot" to move a blocking tile out of the way, some of the mahjong games are still quite challenging. Bonus sparkles also appear every so often in the town scene for more coins.

The unintentional typos and odd wording in the game texts are funny and tragic at the same time, such as calling the holiday firecrackers "slapsticks", or the substitution of "shot" for "shoot". And with all the stuff blowing up in the levels, I couldn't help but think "Everyone's got a bomb, even though it's Christmas".

I originally played Laruaville 4 many years ago at another site, and was surprised to find that the puzzles were still on the rough side...had thought the series had ironed out the kinks by this installment. There's one level which I'm pretty sure you can render impossible to finish if you do the moves in incorrect order. It must've been either the next one or maybe Laruaville 6 where you get extra torches, the bugs aren't a pestilence, and there aren't avalanches of rocks or other obstacles constantly cutting you off. It's tolerable if you want a cutesy holiday M3, but I'm moving on to the later games.